The Grande Prairie Regional College Wolves were at their best during “Win It For The Gipper” weekend.

With the college celebrating the coaching career of retiring bench boss Ron Thomson, the players did their part, sweeping the No. 7-ranked Grant MacEwan Griffins in Alberta Colleges Athletic Conference women’s volleyball action, 3-1 Friday and 3-2 Saturday.

The Wolves came into the contest ranked No. 15 in the country – the first week of the season that the Grande Prairie squad had cracked the Canadian Colleges Athletic Association national rankings list.

The Wolves handed it to the Griffins, particularly Friday night, when they were roughly a 10-minute lapse away from a straight sets victory.

The scores were 26-24, 25-20, 15-25 and 25-17. The Wolves were up 14-11 in the third set, before losing focus and allowing the Griffins to roll off 13 straight points.

“To be honest with you, we watched that set on Saturday morning in our video session, tried to look and see what was happening in that situation and use it as a bit of a motivator,” said Thomson of the third set.

The Griffins had motivation of their own. Friday’s loss was only their second of the second semester, and they had not been swept by a team all season. In fact, they had not been swept in a series since Nov. 11-12 of 2011.

Until Saturday.

The Wolves returned to the court Saturday afternoon with confidence and momentum, and although the Griffins put up a better fight, the

“We did a good job on Saturday,” said Thomson. “Right after Friday night’s win, we talked about what we could do better and we did that well.”

While the Wolves were deserving of the wins, Thomson did let the Griffins off the hook somewhat.

“Part of it is that our backs were really against the wall, whereas for Grant MacEwan, this weekend probably didn’t matter at all for them, other than the confidence factor going into the playoffs,” said the ever-diplomatic Thomson. “As a coach you always want to protect that confidence, but deep down inside, they probably knew that it didn’t really matter to them that much.

The good news is that the sweep moved the Wolves into a three-way tie for fifth place in the final regular season standings.

The bad news is that, despite having a better games won/lost record than both Medicine Hat and Olds, the Wolves finished seventh in the standings and have to play in the wild-card tournament.

Because of the unbalanced schedule, in the case of the three-way tie, the tiebreaker is record against common opponents.

“So that hurt us the most of anybody,” said Thomson. “When you look at Olds being the first year in the league... they haven’t played Lakeland, they haven’t played NAIT, they haven’t played Grant MacEwan. All those teams that we played really well against, those all get eliminated. So it’s a little bit disheartening when you look at that procedure.”

Disheartening, to be sure, but every team knew the tiebreaking methods going in and Thomson said to his girls that they only have themselves to blame.

“We knew that that’s the way it was and we made that bed – we lost a couple of matches early in the season (that we shouldn’t have) and that’s what has come back to haunt us,” said Thomson. “I have been trying to deal with my players today (Sunday) just telling them not to be angry about it but to use it as motivation. We are responsible for controlling our own destiny and we can’t blame anyone else for those other losses, other than ourselves.”

There is a silver lining. As the seventh-place team, the Wolves will host the four-team wild-card tourney. The King’s University College Eagles, the Briercrest Clippers and the SAIT Trojans will converge on the GPRC campus this upcoming weekend for a play-in weekend, to determine the No. 7 and 8 seeds at the provincial tournament in Red Deer Feb. 22-24.

The Wolves will play the 10th-place Trojans on Friday night, with the winner automatically advancing to the Red Deer tourney.

Friday night’s winner will play the winner of the Eagles/Clippers match (also played Friday night) on Saturday afternoon to determine 7 and 8 in Red Deer.

The wild-card tourney will be previewed in depth in Friday’s DHT.

Men move on

Despite a pair of losses to the Grant MacEwan Griffins over the weekend, the men’s Wolves team still advanced to that wild-card tourney, as the 10th seed.

The 6-14 Wolves fell 3-1, 3-0 to the 9-11 Griffins, but received a lot of help over the weekend from Keyano, who swept Lakeland to keep the Rustlers behind the young Wolves squad.

The Wolves will head to Edmonton to play at King’s College, against the No. 7 Eagles on Friday night.